Thursday, 20 March 2014

A Portrait of Hate: Fred Phelps 1929-2014

Well Fred Phelps is dead.

He was born in 1929, so he made
84.

It is almost impossible to describe this man, such was his life, such is
his legacy. Probably the closest single word as epithet would be 'tyrant' or perhaps ‘hatemonger’. A man so full of bitterness and bile that he twisted and
contorted his entire extended family into a parody and turned them into willing
acolytes in the cult that is the Westboro Baptist Church, obeying the old
patriarch to the letter. Until very recently, he ruled the cult as impassioned
religious demagogue but also as tyrant. The Louis Theroux 2007 BBC documentary ‘The
Most Hated Family in America’ showed all too well the fear of Phelps that was
held by the family members. His tyranny was rampant and so, not much
questioning, not much dissent occurred in Westboro Baptist.

Their ‘church’ has been rejected by the Baptists and other
Protestant denominations as has Phelps himself for his extremist views. On only
a few occasions, one or two family members have left the cult and have been
rejected by them ever since. The evil perpetrated in this man’s name at so many
levels is astounding and is a monument to the obsession, opprobrium and resolve
of Phelps to do all in his power to militate against gay people and more
latterly, the whole of America, including its dead soldiers and the military in
general, for accepting gay people.

So why? How did it come to this?

Phelps was not a stupid man. He had graduated from law school. He was also
given to obsessiveness and retribution for perceived hurt. He had worked as a lawyer
in his earlier career, but presaging the turmoil that would surround his adult
life, he was disbarred in 1977 in telling circumstances.

The Wikipedia entry for his disbarment states:

“A formal complaint was filed against Phelps on November 8,
1977, by the Kansas State Board of Law Examiners for his conduct during a
lawsuit against a court reporter named Carolene Brady. Brady had failed to have
a court transcript ready for Phelps on the day he asked for it; though it did
not affect the outcome of the case for which Phelps had requested the
transcript, Phelps still requested $22,000 in damages from her. In the ensuing
trial, Phelps called Brady to the stand, declared her a hostile witness, and
then cross-examined her for nearly a week, during which he accused her of being
a "slut", tried to introduce testimony from former boyfriends whom
Phelps wanted to subpoena, and accused her of a variety of perverse sexual
acts, ultimately reducing her to tears on the stand. The trial became an
exhibition of a personal vendetta by Phelps against Carolene Brady. His examination
was replete with repetition, badgering, innuendo, belligerence, irrelevant and
immaterial matter, evidencing only a desire to hurt and destroy the defendant.
The jury verdict didn't stop the onslaught of Phelps. He was not satisfied with
the hurt, pain, and damage he had visited on Carolene Brady” (Wikipedia).

While being trained in the profession of the law, Phelps was
not of the calibre to be able to examine intensively and extensively. In other
words, he was smart enough, but he was no genius. And his personality traits
coalesced with some little intelligence as to make him an impossible and unreasonable opponent.

“A little learning is a
dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the
Pierian spring”

(Alexander Pope, Essay on
Criticism, 1709).

Pope’s famous couplet is apposite to Fred Phelps most surely.
His wit took him to Bible College where he was eventually ordained into a
Southern Baptist church and his personality took him to extreme Calvinism where
he thought of himself as a Primitive Baptist (not that they accepted him
either). I have always found Calvin pretty hard to swallow and have rejected
his most famous of theological positions:
unconditional election and limited
atonement; the first holding that God has chosen a certain elect to be
saved, their own lives being irrelevant to God’s decision, while others are not
to be saved; while the second holds that Christ died for these elect only and
not for anyone else. The God portrayed by these theologies comes off as a
pretty unsavoury character, hugely partial, biased and indifferent to the lost
eternity of those not in the elect which is most of humanity if you think about
what Jesus said, ‘narrow is the gate and few there be that find it’. The pure
Calvinist God is monstrous and couldn’t match it with the weakest of human
fathers. Phelps was utterly and completely attracted to this portrayal of a ruthless
God like a moth to a flame. This imago dei
matched his own skewed retributive and belligerent personality. In the Westboro
Baptist cult otherwise known as the ‘God hates fags church’, Phelps fashioned God after
his own image.

Fred Phelps’ behaviour is legendary or more accurately
infamous. I do not need to go into the picketing of funerals of gay people and
of fatally wounded American soldiers. I do not have to go into the hate speech
and vile invective of their website. If you believed that, then God hates
everything and everyone, every nation, every person not of the Phelps
persuasion. It is a theology of grotesquery, a twisted parody of the
Judaeo-Christian God-figure where God is portrayed as a furious, rage-filled,
retributive, violent, castigating, aggressive, vengeful deity. “Can you preach
the Bible without preaching the hatred of God?” Phelps asked in a 2006
interview with The Associated Press. “The answer is absolutely not". The Theroux
documentary was challenging to watch as the members of the cult when speaking of God
came across as being absolutely terrified of him. And their fear of God was what they
preached and protested.

A man of impenetrable hatred preaching a god of fury, rage,
retribution, judgement and tyranny and indoctrinating his family to do the same; adults and children alike. It is not conceptually possible to get
further away from the relational God whose essence is love that Jesus told us
of if you purposely tried.

What do we do with Phelps’ death? Well, whether we are
Christian or not, I believe we should be better and bigger than Phelps and his
family ever were. We should not picket his funeral if he has one. We should not
dance on his grave. We should not delight in the demise of another human being. If we do call ourselves followers of Jesus, then we need to leave Phelps to God and not return hatred for hatred.

It is hard to imagine anyone being so unempathic, so blind to the suffering he
caused others. But psychologists do talk about a trait called psychopathy that is
identified in people who do not have the ability to empathise. Most people
usually think immediately of serial killers when we use this term, but serial
killers are only the extreme version of psychopathy. Many people are known to
exhibit strong traits of psychopathy, eg., some bosses and narcissists come to
mind. It is often associated with either narcissistic or anti-social
personality disorder. It would not surprise me to learn that Phelps might have
been in one of these categories, such was his lack of empathy.

As such, I think he deserves our pity. Please do not
misperceive my meaning here. I do not feel sorry for Fred Phelps. And I certainly
do not endorse his life. But I do wonder whether this was a tormented soul. Was
Phelps narcissistic? Did he have a personality disorder? Did he have homosexual
inclinations himself and used Freudian reaction
formation as a defence against it? We will never know. But we do know that
Fred Phelps was not a happy man nor a man in peace. I am comfortable leaving
him to whatever comes next for those of his ilk. He leaves a dreadful and
terrible legacy of twisted religious bile behind him and a family probably
forever destroyed.

There is one final point I wish to make. It has been a
strong theme through the whole BGBC Blog. I want to point out that Fred Phelps
was a fundamentalist extremist. But he used mainstream Christian doctrine and
well-known Bible verses to spread his filth. Where we are convinced that we
have the truth and everyone else is heretical; where we hold that our version of
God is correct and all others are in error; where we say what is right and what
is wrong; where we focus on one tenet of thought and neglect all others; where
we ignore science and human reason; where we pronounce judgement on our fellow
human beings guided by our own teachings; where we split God’s beautiful
creation into the saved and unsaved, the elect and non-elect, the washed and
the great unwashed; where we put dogma ahead of people; where we give blind
allegiance to texts written in the ancient world; where we place the letter of
the law before the spirit of the law; where we follow a primitive
tribalism over an inclusivity of the family of humanity, then any of us potentially
could become another Fred Phelps.

Fundamentalism misses the point of
spirituality entirely. It is a parody of authentic spiritual life. It is
pharisaic and misguided. In its most tribal forms, it is cruel and even cultic.
It is a diminution of the human spirit and an attempt to give borders to the
divine, to put God in a box.

Fred Phelps might have been one of a kind and to be sure, he
was. But there is a lesson here. The road away from Jesus - his life, his
example, his teachings, his non-violence, his preparedness to forgive, his
willingness to love, his desire to be with those most struggling, his
willingness to die to show a better way - leads only to law, judgment, exclusion,
arrogance and domination; the stuff of fundamentalist religion. People suffer
under the yoke of fundamentalism because the focus of fundamentalism is not
people; it is conformity. Jesus' focus was always the people. Fred Phelps was an exemplar of the most extreme forms
of fundamentalism and should be discussed in the same arena as Jim Jones, Shoko
Ashara, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard and other cultists of their ilk. When you
look at Fred Phelps, you see a neon-lit example of how fundamentalism can
easily tip over into cultism. For those of us who call ourselves Christian, we
need always to be vigilant that we follow in Jesus’ footsteps and to eschew
once and for all religious arrogance.

Vale Fred Phelps. In truth, the world will not be poorer for your
passing.